


man was matter

by orphan_account



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 616 elements, Character Death, Civil War Team Iron Man, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Semi-dystopic setting, questionable science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-30 11:53:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12653043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “Stop looking at me like that. I’m not him and I’m not the holy ghost here to absolve you of your sins either.”Steve Rogers is looking at him wide eyed, jaw tight, fingers clutching to his shield for dear life. Steve reaches out a hand to touch, and his fingers fall through the the blue causing the image to shake before re-stabilizing.He remains silent and looks on sadly, trying to puzzle out what’s in front of him.The image sighs and continues to sift through the dust. The foundation of Stark Tower is weakened and this is his last chance to explore what would have been his home before it crumbles.“You know it’s rude to stare,” he says, and the trance on Steve is broken.“If you’re not him then what are you?”(Or, the last secrets of Tony Stark glow blue and flicker in the night only to get caught in conversations with Steve Rogers at the end of the world.)





	man was matter

**Author's Note:**

> “Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.”  
> ― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

They execute him early in the morning, and the New York air is crisp and cold- just turning fall.

He’s dragged onto the podium by two men in nondescript black suits. They grip roughly at his forearms, and it jostles his wrists against the cuffs binding them. It irritates the bruises that are already there, but he’s half starved and too weak to walk so he has to be forced ahead.

They don’t ask for his last words, and all the better because what would he say? He’s talked himself raw in confinement and there’s no words left to give, only the sour scratch of his throat as confirmation that they were said at all.

Ross holds the cool metal of at his temple and talks on and on about the new face of justice while the crowd looks on polarized- some horrified, some cheering. When Ross is finished speaking he pulls the trigger, and a tarp catches the blood before it hits the man’s suit.

When that’s done, he hands the gun off to somebody on the side of the stage. He shakes his hands and looks directly at the camera broadcasting live, ignoring the body as it’s rolled up in the tarp and dragged off.

“Let this be an example.”

*  
Two weeks after Captain America breaks his team out of the Raft, Tony Stark is arrested and brought in on aiding and abetting international terrorists and violation of the Accords. It makes headlines.

They bring him to the Raft, newly reinforced, but it only holds him. He sits alone in one of the cells. They didn’t bother to give him a change of clothes and he wonders if it’s a tactical moves or just sheer laziness.

The leave him alone for the better part of a day, but he knows that there’s a camera with an audio feed and a manned control room somewhere so he talks to fill the space. He never could stand the quiet, and he knows somebody is being paid to listen.

There’s nothing constitutional to keep him here anyways. He figures he’ll be out for a trial soon enough, and making a break for it will only worsen his chances. If he plays his cards right, this will be wiped away easy enough. It’s only a waiting game now.

*  
“Stop looking at me like that. I’m not him and I’m not the holy ghost here to absolve you of your sins either.”

Steve Rogers is looking at him wide eyed, jaw tight, fingers clutching to his shield for dear life. Steve reaches out a hand to touch, and his fingers fall through the the blue causing the image to shake before re-stabilizing.

He remains silent and looks on sadly, trying to puzzle out what’s in front of him.

The image sighs and continues to sift through the dust. The foundation of Stark Tower is weakened and this is his last chance to explore what would have been his home before it crumbles.

“You know it’s rude to stare,” he says, and the trance on Steve is broken.

“If you’re not him then what are you?”

*  
He loses track of how long he waits on the raft. They give him just enough food and water to survive and he’s bathed only semi regularly. They’re finally forced to give him a change of clothes, but those hang off of him too. His facial hair grows out of control as well and he tries not to catch his reflection in the glass of his cell.

Once a week, he thinks it’s once a week at least, Ross comes to interrogate him and it’s the only time Tony goes silent.

Ross always overdresses, and smiles politely at him. He calls him _friend,_ and tells him that this can all end- but Ross has nothing on Afghanistan or the Ten Rings and Tony doesn’t crack under this game.

The first question, the only question, that Ross asks is always about where Captain America and his associates are hiding and every time Tony thinks the same thing- if the man is too stupid to figure it out on his own then he doesn’t deserve the answer anyways. He figured where they would go out himself before he even left Siberia.

*  
Again Steve finds him at his would-be parent’s graves. Steve especially, of all people, should not be here. It would’ve taken him awhile to get out here anyways. It’s so far from the destruction of the city. It’s the last quiet place around.

Steve stares at him where he sits cross-legged in front of their graves and leans himself against a tree to watch him.

“You’re angry with me like he was. You mourn them,” Steve inclines his head towards the graves, “like him.”

He looks up at Steve sharply but doesn’t move because the winds are high and if he stands his image won’t hold.

“Full offense, but don’t you have something better to be doing?”

*  
Eventually he accepts that he won’t be getting out of the Raft without escaping. Nobody is going to come for him, and Ross is long past playing fair. With the Accords at least, if everything had gone according to plan there was room to amend them. Here, Ross has gone solo, and with Tony as his captive there’s nobody to put him in check.

He can’t escape from the inside. The Raft is too closely guarded and he’s nearly defenseless. His one saving grace is that whoever designed this place was stupid enough to put the camera on the inside of his cell rather than the outside. He’s fast enough when he breaks the camera that by the time they get to him the damage has already been done.

There’s no windows to check but he breaks the camera at what he believes is night and uses the broken glass from the lens to make deep incisions on the inside of his left arm. He bleeds quickly and a lot, and he’s lightheaded before he knows it.

In the meantime, he uses his right hand to dig through the incisions to where he’s planted a microchip equipped with a panic button under his skin. He had it put in at the same time as he had the arc reactor removed and for once his paranoia has served him well.

He passes out just as he triggers the button that will force F.R.I.D.A.Y. to revive the iron legion.

*  
The Avengers museum is just past mid Brooklyn, a tribute in the name of their first. The outside of it is covered in graffiti, big red letters, underlined spelling out _Where are they now?_. The windows are boarded up but the door was kicked in a while ago and hangs loosely off it’s hinges.

He goes in to look around but find Steve Rogers waiting for him. Steve is looking at what’s left of the displays, though most of the props have been torn or stolen.

“You’re in my place this time,” Steve says.

He snorts at that.

“What? Like you’re the only Avenger.”

Steve tightens the belt on his tactical suit. A strange change that it’s all black now. Steve walks right through the hologram that is him when he leaves.

“And you’re not one at all.”

*  
His girl does him well. F.R.I.D.A.Y. assembles the Iron Legion fast and hones in on him quickly but by then he’s lost too much blood and the guards were forced to transfer for him to a hospital.

Ross is quick to alert the press that is he receiving adequate medical care for his self inflicted injuries. The Iron Legion is caught hovering protectively around the Raft before F.R.I.D.A.Y. shuts them down as is her protocol to curtail civilian fear. The press has a field day with the knowledge that they were there, and from the TV in his hospital room he can see that it looks just as bad as he feared it would at the start.

Within a day the news breaks that the U.S. government is seizing the suits and any other potentially dangerous property created or owned by Tony Stark. The joke is on them, though, because anything he made that’s actually dangerous is coded to self destruct when tampered with by hands that aren’t his own. This news breaks before the first news cycle is even over.

*  
The compound went out of power ages ago, like most everywhere else, and with this time of night, his blue is the only light coming through the place. He’s startled when Steve Rogers addresses him from an armchair in the living room.

“I didn’t mean what I said, last time.”

He walks over to the living room, to see if he can give it enough light to get a good look at the man, but stops to run his hands over some photos hanging in the hallway.

“You weren’t wrong. I’m not him.”

He can hear Steve get up from the armchair. He comes over to him and when he’s close enough he can see Steve run a hand through his now too-long hair.

“You remember everything. You even act like him. Why do you keep-,” Steve stutter over himself, let’s out a shaky breath, “I’m sorry, I.-”

They’re going in circles with this conversation. He slides down the wall and looks at nothing because there’s nothing to see.

“Why didn’t you tell him?”

Steve slides down on the wall next to him and nearly cries.

“I think I’ve finally racked up enough regrets to match my years.”

*  
They convict him, unanimously guilty, of the injuries caused by the destruction of the Iron Man suits. He knows the explosions wouldn’t have been lethal, and that the death count is being exaggerated, and the jury is being paid off or lied to, but he doesn’t have any good credit left to correct them. Some small part of him holds out hope that somebody will come before they kill him, but it’s a long shot at best.

*  
They execute him. It’s fall, it’s cold, and nobody saves him.

*  
F.R.I.D.A.Y. scours every news article about his death until there are none left.

When they seized suits they couldn’t figure out how to power down the arc reactor so with enough energy, she remained operational. The scope of her own ability to emote in the wake of her grief shocks and scares her. Day by day she spirals out of control until in a moment of complete anger at her loss she redirects all her power into rewriting her own code.

At the end of her outburst, F.R.I.D.A.Y. no longer exists, giving birth instead to the holographic form of her own creator- stitched together using every memory and piece of information she had on him.

*  
He stays in the compound with Steve until dawn breaks, and they can see the trees outside the windows.

In the light of day, they try to talk again.

Steve makes his way to the kitchen, fills a glass of water from the faucet-somehow still running, before speaking, “I didn’t think he’d need to be saved. I’m not trying to call the others weak, but-”

“I know,” he says and twists his hand around, looking for the spaces between the blue,” You and him were supposed to be the same.”

Steve takes a look around the decay of the compound and glides his hand through the dust on the counter, “Survivors.”

It’s not a glitch in the system to remember as much as he does, but it’s a glitch to feel it all the same.

“I’m not sure if it makes a difference, but he missed you while you were gone. I think..I think you hurt him so much because he cared too much.”

Steve sighs.

“I think about him all the time, you know. There’s so much I would’ve done differently.”

He doesn’t know what to say that because they’re all out of time anyways. The world is a wasteland and he’s just the living mimicry of a dead man. Going from place to place has only served to remind him of that.

He settles on, “I know,” and gets up to leave, thinking about his next haunt. Hopefully it’s somewhere he can get to before nightfall.


End file.
